Monday, June 18, 2012

Atheist Meditation: Two-Part Morality


Since I first became an atheist about four years ago, I have read, thought, and encountered many different ideas about ethics and morality. I have attempted to reconstruct my moral views since I decided that my former Christian ideas were no longer adequate.

Previously, before my deconversion, my sense of morality was influenced by my Christian faith, but it wasn't strictly defined by the Bible or by the teachings of my church. The ideas of my friends and family, as well as my personal intuitions, were another strong influence on my beliefs. I was usually able to reconcile my faith with these more personal views.

As a cynic would note, it is not surprising that my values and my interpretation of Christianity coincided. That is not what I want to discuss, however: I'm trying to showcase how I formed some of my views of morality as an atheist.

While I majored in philosophy (along with political science), I'm afraid that my views on ethics are not influenced in a major way by the individual foundations of any philosophers. My take on morality now is mostly formed by intuitions I've formed based on a combination of philosophical and academic readings, discussions with intelligent friends, and personal experience.

In my opinion, many philosophical arguments about ethics are misleading and don't encourage relevant discussions of what is actually moral. One of the biggest offenders is the subjective/objective morality argument: is there some set of concrete moral values that exists outside the whims of humanity, or is morality a product of human experience?

My current conclusion about the subjective/objective morality question is that the question is a red herring - the question itself is too limited. A better question, and line of thinking, examines the nature of morality and then decides which labels fit the phenomenon of moral thinking.

Morality concerns human action or inaction, so morality is really a study of decision-making. Different sorts of decisions tend to achieve different sorts of results, but which decision to choose often depends on which result is desirable. Morality concerns both questions: 1) which moral decisions are effective, depending on the result? 2) which moral results are desirable, depending on the situation?

Different situations may require different results, and different results may require different decisions. There are empirical answers to tell you which decisions will bring which results, but there no empirical answers to uncover which results are desirable.

Thus, when someone such as Sam Harris argues that morality can be illuminated with research, he is partly right and partly wrong. Once you agree on your assumptions (about what results are desirable), then yes, research can hone your knowledge about which decisions are effective in bringing your goals into being, and therefore, moral. However, there is no empirical process that can state definitely which results and assumptions are important in a situation - that is a judgement of values, not physical reality.

From this perspective, morality is objective on one level, and subjective on a deeper level. Once you decide what results and conditions are important, you can use evidence to conclude which decisions will drive the results you desire. Decision-making is objective, but value-making is subjective: morality combines the value-making and decision-making elements, and a fully developed sense of morality requires both parts to function properly.

I hope you weren't expecting me to devise a moral system. That's beyond the scope of this blog! I encourage you to read ethicists if you are interested in the subject (haha). I can't let my audience leave without returning again to philosophy, can I?

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